438
THE SAXONS IN ENGLAND.
[book I.
shall he do, who is not trained in watching abstract
forms of thought! Is he more likely to find the
answer in himself! Alas, no ! he feels only too
surely that his nature can give no satisfying re-
sponse ; that his confined and bounded being is
itself full of problems which remain unsolved.
And now let this state be considered with refer-
ence to the early inhabitant of a world, whose secrets
are yet undiscovered, and on whom no light of hea-
venly radiance has fallen. For him, as for us, there
is no answer either in the phænomenon or in the
observer : but he has no reason to reject the sup-
position of a supernatural influence: everything
that surrounds him is filled with evidence of super-
natural power. He lives in nearer communion than
we do with the world about him : his frame, not
yet clogged and vitiated by the habits of an ad-
vanced cultivation, is more alive than ours to the
external effects of natural causes : the world itself,
existing under different conditions of climate, dif-
ferent electrical combinations, not yet subdued by
the plough, or the axe of the forester, not yet
bridled and trained by the canal, the manufactory
or the railroad, has effluences which act upon the
nerves and fluids of the man, and which seem to
him divine emanations, revelations of the divinity
within the lake, the mountain and the tree : the
lake, the mountain and the tree he peoples then
with gods,—with Nymphs and Nereids, with Oreads
and Hamadryads—to whose inward and spiritual
action the outward owes its power and its form.
C≡. x∏∙]
HEATHENDOM. CONCLUSION.
439
But the outward and visible is not a sign only, of
the inward and spiritual ; it is a symbol, a part
of that which it denotes ; it is at once the sower and
the seed.
In no age can man be without the great ideas of
God, of right, of power, of love, of wisdom ; but an
age that has not learnt to feed upon abstractions,
must find the realization of those ideas in the out-
ward world, and in a few familiar facts of human
nature. It strives to give itself an account of itself,
and the result of its efforts is a paganism, always
earnest and imaginative, often cruel and capricious,
as often gentle, affectionate and trusting—for even
in spite of cruelty and caprice, the affections will
have their way, and trust will find a home. Its in-
consistence is the offspring not of guilt, but of im-
perfect knowledge : it seeks the great solution of
all religious problems, a mediator between God and
man : it is its error, but not necessarily its crime,
that it finds that mediator in the complex of the
world itself : no other has been revealed to it ; and
the reveries of philosophy that haunt the sounding
Portico or the flowery swathes of Hymettus, cannot
tell of the “Unknown God” to the agriculturist,
the huntsman or the pirate.
I belie∖ e in two religions for my forefathers : one
that deals with the domestic life, and normal state
of peace ; that sanctifies the family duties, pre-
scribes the relations of father, wife and child, di-
vides the land, and presides over its boundaries ;
that tells of gods, the givers of fertility and increase,
the protectors of the husbandman and the herds-